Beauty in the Darkness: reflections on life in 2024 and moving forward

2024 was exhausting for most of us. The line between reality and fiction just keeps getting closer as the Mike Judge-like dystopian fantasy we live in becomes stranger and stranger. In the span of 12 months, we watched celebrity culture continue to consume more of our attention, we all fell in love with a baby hippo being held against her will, people over 40 struggled to keep up with nonsense words and trends (including finding out exactly what a CharliXCX is), and a random girl from Tennesee turned a 10 second TikTok soundbite into a podcast and million dollar crypto scam. We also saw massive shifts to how our world operates with the continued genocide in Gaza, the rise of AI, corporate greed leading to inflation and layoffs, and 60 million Americans thought that a senile sociopath could lead us through these crises and the hundred other disasters lurking beneath the surface of the 2020s. To cap it all off, we saw a public assassination of a corporate executive that most Americans either implicitly or explicitly support. Since writing this, I’m sure something else has gone viral or happened to keep this death spiral of attention going. 

Dealing with all of this is exhausting and is indicative of what it feels like living in the world today. We see more of the world than any other generation. We know more about it too, with everything we could ever want at our fingertips. Every day is filled with more information than we could possibly digest and that’s precisely what’s causing so much chaos. Life has become a race to see who can keep up with the pace of information and who can get the most attention in these spaces. The internet has become one big game that we’re all desperately trying to win. We never close our laptops because we want to be the best at work. We carefully curate our social media feeds because we want to win at social media. We optimize every bit of our lives so that it’s perfect. When we do have a moment to rest, we can’t even focus because our brains have been rewired so every spare bit of attention has to be used to consume any of the stories I mentioned above. We can never stop the race because information never stops. The attention economy never stops. Our system of runaway capitalism isn’t just built on memes and viral moments though, it also relies on our lives getting harder. This is another reality of what it’s like to be alive today. Too many people can barely get by because of the way the information era has transformed our economy. Our attention and consumption are generating immense wealth for a smaller and smaller group of people. People who want nothing more than to consolidate power and keep us spinning the hamster wheels, tired, sick, and lonely staring at the screens that fuel their empires.

It’s no wonder so many of us feel the way we do in this age of anxiety. Our lives are punctuated by this sureal backdrop of unchecked technology and global crises. In that storm though, we each have a story. With how fast everything moves, that can be hard to remember. When I stop to reflect on my own story from this year, I struggle to find the words. At the beginning of the year, I dealt with career challenges based on the pressure from a misshapen economy and corporate greed which really set me off kilter. At other times of the year, our cultural epidemics rooted in despair hit closer and closer to home. I also moved more than in any year previously as life kept pushing me in new directions. During all of that, there was the usual bullshit of being a young adult in the 2020s. Everything is too expensive, our jobs suck, and there’s just too much going on all the time. In many ways, it’s probably too much, I mean I’ve never been more exhausted. Remarkably, though, 2024 was my best year yet. Even though I’m exhausted, I’ve never felt more alive, I’ve never felt more me. Through all of the fear, uncertainty, and anxiety, I found something. 

I’m really hard on myself and I’m sure you are too. It’s the paradox of this time we live in. Despite doing so much to keep up with it all, we never feel like we’re doing enough. No matter how many challenges we overcome or how well we handle the global shit show, we think we’re failing. At a certain point, you have to ask why. There were so many moments this year filled with doubt where I felt like everything I worked so hard to heal from would crash back in, but yet here I am standing stronger than I was 12 months ago. Looking back, what I think I found this year was the space to find peace in the trenches of life. Life is really hard right now, but as the great American poet Vince Staples said “Life is hard, but I go harder”. Just because life seems fucked up, doesn’t mean we’re fucked up. None of this craziness is us. We’re affected by it and have to deal with the consequences from it, but it’s not us. That can be difficult to see and process in the moment, but at the end of the day we’re all imperfect humans trying to do our best in this ridiculous excuse for a society. As bad as it may feel, none of that is on you. When you learn that you can start seeing the beauty in the madness. 

Originally this piece was going to be about enshittification based on the Spotify wrapped fiasco. It’s what got me started on the road of looking at how everything seems to be getting crazier and worse as time goes by. I realized though that me complaining doesn’t do much. Even though the end product was horrible, that doesn’t take away what music did for me or anyone else this year. This was one of the best years for music in a long time. There were so many incredible albums and concerts that I experienced, I don’t need AI giving me a random genre or fake podcast trying to explain what that meant to me. This goes for all the platforms we live on nowadays. Even though they’re getting lamer as time goes on, it doesn’s mean our lives are. I want to go back to music for a second though. Tyler, the Creator dropped an album this year titled Chromakopia, where the entire premise is not losing your light in the face of all that life throws at us. Many of us are getting older and that comes with a whole new set of challenges. Compound that with the fact we’re living on a dying planet with racists, predators, and man-children running everything, it can feel like everything is getting lamer or that there isn’t a point to any of this. Being human is hard. None of us really know how to navigate this terrible period that just won’t end, but that’s where we show up. This is the other takeaway I had this year. When you find your peace, you can shine your light in your darkness. I think that’s my main goal for next year. Even though things are changing, many for the worse, I still have to shine my light.  

In the past, I’ve written some somewhat corny end-of-the-year pieces about what it means to have goals and the possibility of a new year but ended up skipping writing one last year. I honestly just didn’t know what to write or how to expand on what I had already written. This year I wanted to do something new and start shining that light. After the year we had, well actually more like the years we’ve had, I wanted to reflect on this point in time. That’s why I write this blog in the first place. It’s my way of voicing how wild it is to live through this moment and look at what’s going on in society, technology, and culture. I’ve done my best to to sprinkle in personal anecdotes, but I’ve also failed at times to humanize our collective experience, and in the process failed to humanize myself. Talking in circles and analyzing these subjects to death, ultimately isn’t that helpful. Those pieces may be informative, but it’s hard to take anything away from them. That’s why I pivoted today, I felt like I needed to talk about life, not just some niche subject, but life itself. As we move forward, I plan on doing this more, as I hone in on the human experience and give voice to what it feels like to be alive today.  

I don’t know what my next piece will look like. I may try to do what I had originally planned about enshittification, or I may write about any of the other ways we’re slowly being driven insane by capitalism and technology, but at this point, I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s going to be a new chapter for Breakdowns and Breakthroughs. One where I bring more of myself and you to the forefront. I’m not going to stop writing about how dumb and ridiculous the modern world is, but it’s going to be more relatable. We need real journalism to explain what’s going on, but that’s not why I’m here. My goal is for my writing to be filled with heart and grounded in humanity. With all that’s going on and will undoubtedly be going on in 2025, I think that’s what we all need. This is also going to be a new chapter for me. It feels like I’ve finally found my footing and with that my light. I hope I can translate that into my writing and more aspects of my life. I might fail, I might not, but again none of us are perfect. We’re all beautiful messes, that’s the only thing any of us can have true confidence in. That and each other. So that’s it from me this year. I’ll be back at some point in the new year, after spending some time on the beach with the other half of my beautiful mess. Peace.